Magazine

Feature: García Lorca

Date posted: 7 Jul 2011Author: STC

García Lorca was a master of Spanish drama, and he was all about
the Duende. In this except
from his seminal essay Theory
and Play of The Duende, originally presented as a
lecture in Buenos Aires in 1933, the playwright explains this
powerful force that permeated all of his work including Blood
Wedding...

"Ladies and Gentlemen,

Between 1918 when I entered the Residencia de Estudiantesin
Madrid, and 1928 when I left, having completed my study of
Philosophy and Letters, I listened to around a thousand lectures,
in that elegant salon where the old Spanish aristocracy went to do
penance for its frivolity on French beaches.

Longing for air and sunlight, I was so bored I used to feel as
though I was covered in fine ash, on the point of changing into
peppery sneezes.

So, no, I don't want that terrible blowfly of boredom to enter this
room, threading all your heads together on the slender necklace of
sleep, and setting a tiny cluster of sharp needles in your, my
listeners', eyes.

In a simple way, in the register that, in my poetic voice, holds
neither the gleams of wood, nor the angles of hemlock, nor those
sheep that suddenly become knives of irony, I want to see if I can
give you a simple lesson on the buried spirit of saddened
Spain.

Whoever travels the bull's hide that stretches between the Júcar,
Guadalfeo, Sil and Pisuerga rivers (not to mention the tributaries
that meet those waves, the colour of a lion's mane, that stir the
Plata) frequently hears people say: 'This has much duende'. Manuel Torre, great artist
of the Andalusian people, said to someone who sang for him: 'You
have a voice, you understand style, but you'll never ever succeed
because you have no duende.'

All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail's-shell
of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duendeand recognise it wherever it
appears with a fine instinct. That wonderful singer El Lebrijano,
creator of the Debla, said:
'On days when I sing with duendeno one can touch me.': the
old Gypsy dancer La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a fragment of
Bach, and exclaimed: 'Olé! That has duende!' but was bored by Gluck,
Brahms and Milhaud. And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in
his veins than anyone I've known, on hearing Falla play his own
Nocturno del Generalifespoke
this splendid sentence: 'All that has dark sounds has duende.' And there's no deeper
truth than that.

Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire
that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very
substance of art. 'Dark sounds' said the man of the Spanish people,
agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a
definition of the duende: 'A
mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has
explained.'

So, then, the duendeis a
force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old
maestro of the guitar say: 'The duendeis not in the throat: the
duendesurges up, inside,
from the soles of the feet.' Meaning, it's not a question of skill,
but of a style that's truly alive: meaning, it's in the veins:
meaning, it's of the most ancient culture of immediate
creation.

This 'mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has
explained' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duendethat scorched Nietzche's
heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in
Bizet's music, without finding it, and without seeing that the
duendehe pursued had leapt
from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless
Dionysiac scream of Silverio's siguiriya.

So, then, I don't want anyone to confuse the duendewith the theological demon
of doubt at whom Luther, with Bacchic feeling, hurled a pot of ink
in Eisenach, nor the Catholic devil, destructive and of low
intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter convents,
nor the talking monkey carried by Cervantes' Malgesi in his comedy
of jealousies in the Andalusian woods.

No. The duendeI mean, secret
and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble
and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day
when he drank the hemlock, and that other melancholy demon of
Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and
circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken
sailors.

For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step
that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of
the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is
often said, nor with his Muse. This is a precise and fundamental
distinction at the root of their work. The angel guides and grants,
like St. Raphael: defends and spares, like St. Michael: proclaims
and forewarns, like St. Gabriel.

The angel dazzles, but flies over a man's head, high above,
shedding its grace, and the man realises his work, or his charm, or
his dance effortlessly. The angel on the road to Damascus, and that
which entered through the cracks in the little balcony at Assisi,
or the one that followed in Heinrich Suso's footsteps, create
order, and there is no way to oppose their light, since they beat
their wings of steel in an atmosphere of predestination.

The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. She can do relatively
little since she's distant and so tired (I've seen her twice) that
you'd think her heart half marble. Muse poets hear voices and don't
know where they're from, but they're from the Muse who inspires
them and sometimes makes her meal of them, as in the case of
Apollinaire, a great poet destroyed by the terrifying Muse, next to
whom the divine angelic Rousseau once painted him.

The Muse stirs the intellect, bringing a landscape of columns and
an illusory taste of laurel, and intellect is often poetry's enemy,
since it limits too much, since it lifts the poet into the bondage
of aristocratic fineness, where he forgets that he might be eaten,
suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on
his head - things against which the Muses who inhabit monocles, or
the roses of lukewarm lacquer in a tiny salon, have no power.

Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the
Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her). Golden bread or fold of tunic,
it is her norm that the poet receives in his laurel grove. While
the duendehas to be roused
from the furthest habitations of the blood.

Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick, and forget our fear of
the scent of violets that eighteenth century poetry breathes out,
and of the great telescope in whose lenses the Muse, made ill by
limitatiom, sleeps.